Unclaimed #3: You Spent £5,000 on Your Website and £0 on Your Google Business Profile
You spent £5,000 on your website.
You spent zero minutes on your Google Business Profile.
Google shows your profile five times more than your website.
Do the math.
I see this constantly. Here's exactly how it goes.
The partners decide the website looks tired. They hire a designer. They write new copy. They go back and forth on the About page for three weeks. Someone insists on a bigger logo. Someone else wants the phone number above the fold. It takes months. It costs £5,000.
The site launches. It's beautiful. Modern. Credible. They're proud of it. They should be. It's good work.
Then I open their Google Business Profile.
One review. From 2019. The client called them "the best by far." Nobody ever said thank you.
Zero photos. Fifty people work there. Someone must have taken a photo at some point. A Christmas party. A team lunch. Anything. There's nothing. Just the gray placeholder Google shows when no images exist.
No description. The About page on their £5,000 website has three paragraphs of carefully written copy explaining who they are, what they do, who they serve. The Google profile description field is blank. Not even one sentence.
No services. Their website lists audit, tax, bookkeeping, payroll, corporate finance, forensic accounting. Tick boxes on Google. Ten minutes. Never done.
No posts. No updates. No evidence this firm is still breathing.
This is not a broken firm. It's a firm that put everything into one place and forgot the other place exists. The place Google shows first.
I've looked at over 200 accounting firms in two weeks. This pattern repeats so often I can predict it before I open the profile.
Beautiful website. Ghost profile. Every single time.
Why does this keep happening?
Because a website is something you can see.
A partner can pull it up on their phone in a board meeting. "Look — we invested in our digital presence." The website feels like an asset. You paid for it. You can point to it.
A Google profile doesn't feel like anything.
Nobody at the firm ever looks at it. If they search their own name, they see the map and the address and the star rating and think "fine." They never see what a prospect sees.
What the prospect actually sees
They search "accountant [city]."
Google shows the local 3-pack. Three profiles. Before any website links. Before anything organic.
This firm isn't there. It can't be.
Google's algorithm looks at the profile and sees nothing. No services. No description. No photos. No activity. One unanswered review from six years ago. There's nothing to rank. So Google ranks the competitor instead.
The competitor spent £500 on their website. It looks like 2012. But their profile has 40 reviews, team photos, a description, services, posts. Google knows exactly what they do. So Google hands them the prospect.
Your £5,000 website is beautiful. It's also invisible.
Here's what actually hurts
Everything they need to fix this already exists. They already paid for it. It's all sitting there, unused.
The description is on their About page. Written. Approved. Paid for. Not on Google.
The photos are on their server. Professional photographer. Team shots. Office shots. Paid for. Not on Google.
The services are listed clearly on their website. Just never ticked on the profile.
The reviews are waiting. They have clients who've been with them since before some of their staff were born. Fifteen years. Twenty years. Clients who answer their calls on the first ring. Clients who would do anything for them. Not one has ever been asked to spend two minutes leaving a Google review.
Two hours. That's the gap between the firm they appear to be on Google and the firm they actually are. Two hours and zero additional pounds.
So why doesn't it happen?
The web designer wasn't asked to do it. It wasn't in the scope.
The marketing partner doesn't think about GBP. They think about the website, LinkedIn, maybe Instagram.
The managing partner assumes someone's handling it. Someone always does.
The office manager who set up the profile in 2016 left in 2023. The password left with her.
Nobody owns it. So nobody does it.
And the ghost sits there, month after month, while prospects search, find nothing, and call someone else.
This is Unclaimed #3.
I find what professional services firms leave on the table. No names. Just patterns.
You spent £5,000 on your website. You spent nothing on the thing that gets five times the views. If you want to find your business on Google and see what's missing — what you already paid for but never connected — get a free scorecard.
Unclaimed is written by the founder of VindMyBusiness. I help accounting and bookkeeping firms fix their Google Business Profiles.